About Richard Bowker

Author of the Portal series, the Last P.I. series, and other novels

World building

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here’s a bland paragraph from the novel I’m working on:

She was sitting on our patched brown Victorian sofa wearing her patched blue robe. Two glasses of cider and a plate of bread and cheese and apple slices sat on a side table. She had lit a fire in the fireplace, so the front parlor wasn’t as cold as it usually was. She patted the sofa next to her, and I sat down gratefully. She snuggled up against me.

What’s wrong with that? But when my writing group was discussing this chapter, it raised a question from Mary: Where did they get the wood?

This is in the post-apocalyptic world of my Last P.I. series, so it’s not an unreasonable question. But it’s one that has never occurred to me.

World building is in some ways straightforward. For the Last P.I. world, the big picture is easy enough. There was a nuclear war a couple of decades ago; Boston is still struggling in the aftermath. People are poor; they’re still salvaging what they can from the past and figuring out how to survive in the present. And it’s also not hard to come up with lots of details to flesh out the world: people wear patched robes and sit on patched furniture. Auto parts are scarce and valuable; most people don’t have central heat or electricity…

What’s tricky is calibrating the level of detail to convey in the actual novels, from sentence to sentence. A few readers have complained that I haven’t given enough back story about the war. That’s a big picture issue. Mary wants to know about firewood; that’s an issue about the details. My goal is to put in enough detail to make the world convincing and vivid, without piling on so much information that the story’s momentum is lost.

I have some ideas about how to handle the firewood question. But you’ll have to buy the book if you really want to know the answer.

Crocus

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Because it finally feels like spring around here, I thought I’d steal a crocus from Tom Whelan’s Nature Blog:

Writers in Movies: The Invisible Woman

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in an occasional series.

Like Young Cassidy, The Invisible Woman is a biopic about a famous writer. Unlike Young Cassidy, it is really really good.

It’s the story of Charles Dickens and his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. Ralph Fiennes directed the movie and plays Dickens; Felicity Jones plays Ternan. I like the way the film captures the complexities of the relationship: this wasn’t a love story. Ternan admired Dickens, but above all she needed money and security; Dickens was fond of Ternan, but above all he needed a young, pretty woman to admire him.

Beyond that, I like that they got Dickens right. Dickens was a creep in his personal life: he was awful to his wife, dismissive of his children . . . but he was also haunted by a dreadful childhood that goes a long way toward explaining the mess he made of things. And there was his art and his public, both of which were more important to him than his wife and children. The film captures that: he is constantly writing, and when he isn’t writing, he is performing.

Finally, the emotional climax of the movie is Ternan’s explication of the alternative endings of Great Expectations. How cool is that?

The movie seems to have been kind of a flop, which is too bad. There are plenty of reasons why, I suppose. It’s not especially romantic; there’s no musical soundtrack (which worked for me); Dickens is probably considered old-fashioned and sentimental. But I found it more satisfying than almost every other movie I’ve seen lately.

(By the way, someday I might start an occasional series of Shakespeare on film. The previous movie that Fiennes directed was a modern-day version of Corialanus, with Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain. That, too, was pretty good. And also kind of a flop. Maybe Fiennes needs to sign on to direct Iron Man 4.)

The Nicest Guy Who Ever Lived

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Richard Bowker

. . . is apparently Bobby Orr, whose autobiography, Orr: My Story, I just finished.

(Notice the Saint Louis Blues’ defenseman Noel Picard joining Orr on the cover. Picard has attained a weird sort of immortaility by tripping Orr as he scored the Stanley Cub-winning goal and subsequently appearing in the corner of this iconic photo.)

Anyway, Orr loves his family, loves every one of his coaches and fellow players, and loves everyone he’s met since retiring at the age of 30. (He was so good that the Hockey Hall of Fame decided, the heck with our eligibility rules, and elected him to the Hall at the age of 31.) The only guy he has some difficulty with is Alan Eagleson, his ex-agent, who basically stole all his money and left him near bankruptcy when he retired. Orr has, of course, forgiven the man, but finds it hard to understand how someone could be that not-nice.

Bobby Orr is so nice that, when his book was published last fall, the Boston Globe felt compelled to publish an exposé of Orr, conclusively demonstrating that he is way nicer than he let’s on — constantly doing secret acts of charity that no one is supposed to talk about. Geez, talk about role models.

Anyway, here’s The Goal:

If that whets your appetite, here is a highlight reel, with local legends Fred Cusick and Johnny Peirson announcing:

The Stanley Cup playoffs have started, and the Bruins are favored, but it ain’t like the old days. Helmets sure don’t help, but the game is also more cautious and defensive — you don’t see anything like a Bobby Orr rush anymore. Probably because there could only be one Bobby Orr.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Novels just don’t get any better than that. I don’t really have much more to say about it, but I feel like quoting its first sentence, which is one of the best first sentences ever:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

RIP, Gabriel García Márquez.

Why Barnes & Noble keeps offering to sell me a book I wrote

Posted on April 13, 2014 by Richard Bowker

As I described here, I’ve been baffled by why Barnes & Noble keeps showing me ads that include a book I wrote. I was finally smart enough to track this down and, as people suggested, it has to do with cookies. Turns out there’s a little hard-to-see link in these ads. Click it, and it brings you to an explanatory page that includes an opt-out option. The company behind the ads is called Criteo, and the technology is called personalized retargeting. It’s been around for years. Here’s a New York Times article about it from 2010:

People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.

Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.

So, my cookies tell the software that I’ve visited the pages for Richard Bowker novels on the Barnes & Noble web site. And the software puts up ads that keep reminding me of these very fine novels until I break down and buy one. This is one of those technologies that is equal parts helpful and creepy. I’m not quite ready to get off the grid, like Jack Reacher, but maybe the day will come.

Let’s try another cover for Summit

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Richard Bowker

In the “every cloud has a silver lining” department, my publisher has decided that the crisis in Ukraine might spark some interest in my cold-war psychic-espionage classical-music novel Summit, which has nothing to do with Ukraine but does include several Russian bad guys and a beautiful Russian heroine. Previously they ditched its original cover because they thought the hammer-and-sickle motif was outdated; now they have decided it’s just fine. So here’s our latest cover:

I should also add that the novel is well worth the measly three bucks we’re charging for it.

Do you write and tell?

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Richard Bowker

The New York Times runs occasional pieces on writing in its Draft feature. They are of variable quality. The latest one, called “Not Telling” is pretty good. The writer, a novelist I’ve never heard of named Alice Mattison, is obsessively secret about her novels while she’s writing them:

If I talk about the book, I believe — I cannot help believing — my characters will be angry, and will no longer confide in me about their embarrassing, troubled lives.

She won’t even talk about the novel with her husband:

Once, I decided I should tell my husband a little about the novel I was writing. I informed him that I was about to do so and he sat up straight and looked eager. He’d been waiting for a while. I said — certain I was revealing something of interest — “It’s in five parts.” Then I sat back and waited for enthusiasm.

I have a lot of sympathy. I share my drafts with my writing group, but no one else. My lovely wife has been informed that I’m writing another one of those Walter Sands private eye novels, but that’s it. In my case, I’m not afraid of my characters getting angry; I’m afraid that talking out loud about the plot will make it sound stupid — to me as well as to the listener — and I’ll lose the hubris I need to keep going. At an early stage of writing, my plot is kind of stupid. Not to mention my prose is scattered and unfocused, as I figure out motivations and settings. But I need to stay confident that things are going to get better. I need to keep the world I’m creating safe from outsiders until I’m sure enough in it to pull back the curtain. Then, if people don’t like what I’ve created, I can figure out what, if anything, I need to change — without deciding the whole damn thing’s no good.

Are there 25 good movies about American politics?

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here is Vanity Fair’s list of the 25 best movies about American politics. But… but…

All the President’s Men, sure. The Candidate, fine. Dr. Strangelove? It’s not exactly about politics, but OK. All the King’s Men, A Face in the Crowd? Of course.

But, um, The Queen? Isn’t that sort of, you know, about British politics? (The same folks brought us Frost/Nixon, which isn’t on the list, and probably should be.) The same goes for In the Loop.

The American President is about American politics, of course, but really, it’s not that good a movie — it’s Aaron Sorkin clearing his throat before embarking on The West Wing. If we want throat-clearing, what about including The Ides of March, which seems to be Beau Willimon’s warm-up for House of Cards?

Another omission from the list: the charming Dave, starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. Also, was I the only one who liked Primary Colors, with John Travolta and Emma Thompson portraying the fictional equivalent of the Clintons?

I’ve seen most of the movies on the list. One that I’d never even heard of is Gabriel Over the White House, a 1933 fantasy produced by William Randolph Hearst. VF says:

Walter Huston plays a hack president-elect who gets into an automobile crack-up shortly after he’s sworn in. He is subsequently possessed by a spirit (see title) who guides his actions, which include staging firing squads on Ellis Island and bullying the world into submission by brandishing a super-secret military weapon. Quasi-fascism: it gets things done!

Sounds like it’s worth watching!

Are missing apostrophes more important than dying teenagers?

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Richard Bowker

We report, you decide.

A bizarre battle is raging in towns across Britain between lovers of the English language and local councils that are culling the humble apostrophe from street signs.

The historic university city of Cambridge was the latest in a series of places this year that have made the change, which transforms names such as King’s Road into Kings Road.

Cambridge was forced to backtrack after anonymous punctuation protectors mounted a guerrilla campaign, going out in the dead of night and using black marker pens to fill in the missing apostrophes.

Apparently an apostrophe error earlier this year caused an ambulance to go to a wrong address, resulting in a teenager dying of an asthma attack.

“National guidelines recommended not allocating new street names that required any punctuation, as, we gather, this was not well coped with by some emergency services’ software,” Tim Ward of Cambridge City Council told AFP.

Although I’m not one of those who think the language is going to hell in a handbasket, I have some sympathy for the protesters who say the solution to the problem is not to make punctuation worse, but to make the software that emergency services use better.

On a vaguely related topic: At some point when I wasn’t paying attention, the Catholic Church seems to have removed the possessive from church and school names — at least in my neck of the woods. When I was a lad,we lived in Saint Columbkille’s parish; this is now Saint Columbkille parish. The parochial school down the street from me is Saint Paul School. And so on. A brief Google search indicates that if the school uses the possessive, “Saint Paul’s,” it’s Episcopalian.

The possessive doesn’t make a lot of sense in this context, I suppose. Public schools don’t use it; there aren’t any Martin Luther King’s High Schools. But the possessive usage for saints is so ingrained in my neurons that I’m always stopped short when I encounter the new style.

Next thing you know I’ll be demanding that the Mass return to Latin, which, after all, is the language that God speaks.